


Hands on the Wheel

by levendis



Series: Prompt Fics [14]
Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, Dream Sex, F/M, Non-binary Time Lords, Other, Telepathic Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-07
Updated: 2015-07-07
Packaged: 2018-04-08 02:36:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,587
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4287498
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/levendis/pseuds/levendis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He shouldn’t sleep: when he sleeps he dreams and when he dreams he remembers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hands on the Wheel

**Author's Note:**

> for Tha-Scalos, who prompted: Twelve/Missy - somnophilia + telepathic dream communication

There are other universes, is the thing. There are parallel universes so near to ours you could reach out and touch them, so close in experience that the only thing different is that your mother made you soup when you were ten and home sick, instead of jam on toast. Universes where you missed the train or the elevator or you went to Prague on vacation instead of Paris. Universes that are so much like ours, where so much is the same except you make just one choice differently, and everything changes around it.

And when Missy comes back again, and when he fails to kill her, again, he looks into her eyes and at the gun in his hand which he can’t bring himself to fire. He thinks about telling her about the different universes, the people out there just like them but somehow crucially not at all like what they are; as if she hadn’t aced her  trans-dimensional physics exams, as if she wasn’t fully aware.

He wants to say, maybe this is the universe where one of them does something differently. Maybe she could make another choice. Maybe he could. It isn’t that universe, though. It is what it is; they are what they are. He lets someone else shoot her down. He lets her vanish in a theatrical puff of smoke.

Clara staring at him, tears bright in her eyes: she’s disappointed in him. She’s seen what he is, what he really is, the pathetic little creature in an ill-fitting disguise, who even after all this time cannot let his friend go, no matter how much of a monster she’s become. Clara has seen the ache in him for the woman who brought Danny cruelly back from the dead and then killed him again, who tried to kill her, who’s tried to kill him on more occasions than he can recount. She’s seen how selfish he can be.

Clara is kind, accepting if understandably angry. She hugs him, and it’s a pressure that almost, but not quite, makes the tightness in his chest subside. She won’t fault him for this any more than she has to; still, oh, he’s let her down. Again.

But then she knows, doesn’t she. The lengths someone will go to for the person they love.

 

* * *

_Old friend_ , is how he refers to Missy. Clara knows better than to believe him. _Lovers_ , he tries, but that’s not quite right either. He spreads his hands open, tracing the shape of something nameless, willing her to understand.

They were…other. They were them. And now, they’re not.

_She’s like - like a foot that had gone gangrenous and had to be amputated. It’s what’s best for the body, it’s necessary, but there will always be a sense of loss._

This is also not the right answer but it’s as close as he can come. Clara reaches out and lays her hand on top of his, small and soft and warm on his bigger, colder, much rougher ones. All the callouses he’d been given without earning them, the wrinkles he’d never lived. She puts her hand on his and says, very seriously, _sorry about your foot._

* * *

He doesn’t sleep. When he sleeps he dreams, and when he dreams - he can’t sleep. Catnaps, pharmaceuticals, raw adrenaline, those are enough to keep him going. And the wonders of the universe, of course, the joy in things; people in general and Clara in particular, the knowledge that she is very simply _there._

He keeps going. He keeps running, not sure anymore what it is that he’s running from. Except for sometimes when he doesn’t, those rare moments when the universe takes him by surprise and he just - stops.

Like he’d stopped today, knocked down by a blast of energy for saying the wrong joke to the wrong person. Knocked down and knocked out, thoroughly, only coming to much later (what turned out to be days) in the TARDIS, sealed into a medical pod. Feeling like he’d been pulled apart and then put back together, with one or two pieces inexplicably left over.

Clara’s there when he finally remembers how to unlock the pod from the inside, asleep on a chair in the corner. She looks exhausted, dark circles under her eyes. She’s haggard and unreasonably small, seeming older than she should, certainly too old for the young woman he knows her to be. She shouldn’t look like this, not for him.

He scoops her up carefully and takes her to bed, depositing her gently on top of the covers. She doesn’t say anything, doesn’t open her eyes. She must have woken up at some point. She’s pretending to be asleep for his sake. She knows how hard it is for him, gestures like this. She knows how much trouble he still has with such open displays of affection, how difficult he finds it to admit to the weakness, the tenderness he has for her.

She’s pretending and he is, of course, lying by omission. He shouldn’t sleep: when he sleeps he dreams and when he dreams he remembers.

He’ll tell her one day, maybe. What he’d dreamt about. Who he’d dreamt about, more importantly. The glint of teeth bared in a feral smile, the turn of an ankle in Victorian heels, the flutter of skirts and the fingernails pressed so softly to his cheek. The blood on his hands and the name on his lips.

 

* * *

Clara locks him in his bedroom one day. The room with a bed she assumes is his bedroom, anyway. He’d been nodding off, zoning out. _Just get it over with,_ she says. _You look like you’re about to die. Whatever it is you dream about can’t be worse than what you’re going through awake._

She’s right. She tends to be right, it’s extremely annoying. She tells him she’ll be here in the TARDIS if he needs her, just give a shout. She squeezes his hand before she goes.

When she leaves the room is silent, and terribly empty, and he feels not alone so much as just - isolated. Locked up, locked away. He’s certain he won’t be able to sleep, thinks he’s humoring Clara when he lies down on the bed. And then he closes his eyes.

He could dream about anything, there’s so much material to work from. So many memories stockpiled. But he’s afraid to dream about _her_ so obviously that’s what he does. Self-fulfilling prophecy. He dreams about Missy. Who is sometimes the Master, sometimes Koschei, all the faces that creature had worn.

He dreams of himself as Koschei sees him, as Koschei could not possibly see him. The TARDIS’s telepathic network, maybe. Or Koschei is somehow here. He dreams of himself lying still in the middle of a ridiculous four-poster bed. He seems frail in the absence of action, all sharp bones and paper-thin skin, narrow and delicate and still so very, very dangerous.

She’s always liked him like this. On his back, helpless, submissive by default. Physically submissive, at least. His mind still has its defenses. Old dogs and old tricks, he’s known this one for millennia. When she finally breaks through his mental barrier, it’s not without a fight.

Koschei isn’t ‘her’ in his dreams, not really, that’s not accurate at all. ‘Them’, maybe. Another, more sufficient pronoun on the tip of his tongue - he’s been losing his language slowly but surely over the centuries, so much of it escapes him. And ‘him’ isn’t right for Theta, not in dreams. They are what they are.

And Theta (who is what the Doctor becomes, in dreams) can’t help but enjoy the caress Koschei offers. It’s been so long since they’ve been touched like this. Not hands on their skin but a presence inside them, not a sensation of the shell around them but of the creature within. That scared, trembling assemblage of thought and impulse they will always be, whatever form they choose to present. The familiar thread of desire weaving into their brain. A desperate, shameful joy coursing through what their hearts represent. The old, careworn failings.

This dream, then, is not like the others. No teeth, no bootheels, no corseted curves or muscle beneath tailored suits. This isn’t Theta’s dream. It’s Koschei’s. Who is alive, obviously, who never dies, who is always with them, haunting them, reminding them of what they are. And what they are terrifies them.

Mercifully, necessarily, the memories fade when the Doctor wakes. There’s an impression left, a vague idea, no more. The Doctor wakes up and slips back into the body he wears out of convenience. He rubs the crust out of his eyes. He feels rested, genuinely. He leaves the room with a bed in it and he does not look back.

And if there’s an unsettled, shifting thing inside him now, clustering beneath his breastbone and threatening to burst free, it’s no worse than he’s dealt with before. If Clara stares at him with those big, sad eyes, clearly wishing she knew what to say, how to comfort this part of him she knows he won’t let her touch, at least not now - well, he’ll he’ll tell her one day. When he finds the right words to define what’s wrong. The strength, really, to show her the depths of his weakness, and his strangeness, and what he is capable of holding inside him.

 _There are other 'me’s, is the thing,_ he’ll say. _Not who I’ve been. Who I am, currently._ If he’s lucky, she’ll even believe him.


End file.
